[posted at HuffingtonPost.com and Labor Network for Sustainability Blog]

One great fear is blocking public support for climate protection: The fear that protecting the planet will destroy millions of jobs.

Without a bold program to protect workers from the effects of climate protection, the struggle against global warming can all too easily come to be perceived as a struggle against American workers.

Climate protection advocates have often addressed the threat of possible job losses by pointing out that a transition to green energy would create far more jobs than it would eliminate. While that may be true, it also misses the point. The fact that some people get new jobs provides little solace for the individuals and communities who have lost theirs. They must be protected.

The Great Fear

Fear of job loss is the centerpiece of the campaign against climate protection legislation.

According to the website of the anti-climate protection coalition Energy Citizens, “This legislation will cost more than two million American jobs — hurting millions of Americans who work in or depend on trucking, farming, manufacturing, mining, small business and energy production–or use their cars to commute to work.” The US Chamber of Commerce, Senator Sam Brownback, and local “tea party” protests have similarly made job loss the central argument against climate legislation.

Unless climate protection advocates effectively address these fears, both they and the legislation the support risk a devastating backlash from American afraid of losing their jobs. Read the rest of this entry »

[Crossposted with HuffingtonPost.com and Labor4Sustainability.org]

While fewer and fewer people are willing to publicly deny the validity of global warming science, those who oppose action to protect the climate have taken up a new strategy:  Denying that climate change will have a major impact on the U.S. economy.

This denial is rejected by most economists who have studied climate change.  In a survey of 144 top climate economists released November 4, 2009 by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, 84% agreed that “the environmental effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as described by leading scientific experts, create significant risks to important sectors of the United States and global economies.”  A majority stated that sectors that will be negatively affected include agriculture, fishing, forestry, insurance, and health services.

But the profound negative economic impact of climate change is being largely ignored or denied in the current public policy debate.  This denial threatens to have a significant effect on public policy.  For example, testimony October 14, 2009 by Douglas W. Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, states, “Most of the economy involves activities that are not likely to be directly affected by changes in climate.”  He claims that “a relatively pessimistic estimate for the loss in projected real gross domestic product is about 3 percent for warming of about 7o Fahrenheit (F) by 2100.”  He cites only two studies, one published in 2004; the other, which he describes as “The most comprehensive published study,” was published in 2000, a decade before current research on the impacts of climate change. Read the rest of this entry »

by Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith

On June 7, 2006, a 28-year-old Army lieutenant named Ehren Watada released a video press statement announcing that he was refusing to deploy to Iraq because the Iraq War was illegal and his “participation would make me party to war crimes.” After three years of trying to convict him by court martial, the Army has finally given up and allowed Lt. Watada to resign. Despite his direct refusal of an order to deploy, Watada did not spend a single day in jail.

Watada’s Story

A former Eagle Scout with a degree in finance, Watada volunteered for military service after 9/11. His motives could hardly have been more patriotic. For himself and his fellow soldiers, he said, “the reason why we all joined the military” and “the commitment we made to this country” is “to sacrifice everything–sacrifice our lives, our freedom–to ensure that all Americans live in a country where we have true democracy.”

When he learned that he would be shipped to Iraq, Lt. Watada began to read everything he could find about the war, on all sides, so that he could better motivate the troops under his command. One of the books he read was James Bamford’s A Pretext for War. In a film made about his story, In the Name of Democracy, Watada described shock at what he learned: “Our country, and we as a military, had been deceived. There’s no other way of putting it. Whether they misrepresented the truth, or they told half-truths or misled–it’s a lie.” The Iraq War was “a war not out of self-defense but by choice.”

Watada is not a pacifist, and he based his stand not just on the falsehood of the justifications for the war but on the usurpation of legitimate constitutional authority by the officials in the George W. Bush administration.

“There came a time when I saw people with power, and they held that power absolute and they did not listen to the will of the people,” he says in In the Name of Democracy. “That was the leadership of our country. Those were the people who were in charge of our lives, and yet they did what they wanted to do with impunity, and nobody was willing to stand up and challenge them.”

Watada offered to resign or to be deployed to Afghanistan; the Army refused. He felt bound by his military oath to do what his conscience abhorred. Then he had an epiphany: his military oath actually required him to refuse orders he believed were illegal, and his loyalty was owed to the Constitution, not to the officials who were perverting it.

“I believe the only real God-given right we have is the freedom to choose,” Watada says. “And when we take that away from ourselves, then we put ourselves in an invisible prison that nobody else imposes on us except for ourselves. When you tell yourself again that you do have a choice–I could go to prison for it, I could be tortured, I could die for it, but I have that choice and I can make it–then that invisible prison kind of lifts off, and you feel free. I felt so free when I told myself that I have a choice.” Read the rest of this entry »

[originally posted on HuffingtonPost.com]

Obama’s climate czar Carol Browner said last week there will be no U.S. climate protection legislation before the Copenhagen conference and that she doesn’t know if a global agreement on binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions can be made in Copenhagen.  She added that she had hope for progress because the world’s top leaders recognize global warming is a problem.

As the torturous Copenhagen negotiations and the already-inadequate U.S. climate protection legislation falter, the earth is being imperiled by a failure of its political systems.  We know what needs to be done to halt global warming; we have the technology and resources to halt it; we know the consequences of not doing what we know must be done.  If the “world’s top leaders” recognize that “global warming is a problem” and do nothing about it, they are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

While the earth burns, the “world’s top leaders” are standing around pointing the finger at each other like a bunch of arsonists trying to distract the world’s attention from their handiwork.  The U.S. attacks China for its growing carbon emissions.  China, backed by130 other third world countries, justly attacks the developed countries for their failure to take responsibility for their damage to the planet’s atmosphere - but then continue their plans to build new climate-destroying coal-fired power plants week by week.  The EU piously condemns the U.S. position, but doesn’t care enough to take the Americans on.

The failure of current climate protection strategies tells us that the current strategy of lobbying governments to fix global warming will not work.

In the past, the failure of establishments to solve problems that they and their people recognize has often led to the emergence of radical movements demanding real change.  Remember, for example, how betrayed government promises for racial equality and nuclear disarmament helped spawn the civil rights, ban-the-bomb, and new left movements of the 1960s. Read the rest of this entry »

Under escalating pressure from activists, Nike, the utility giant Pacific Gas & Electric Company, and others have publicly resigned from the US Chamber of Commerce over its opposition to climate protection policies. It’s time for labor unions to follow suit by cutting all ties with groups opposing climate legislation like the Chamber-funded Energy Citizen’s Alliance.

The AFL-CIO’s newly elected president Richard Trumka recently told an audience at the “Jobs, Justice, and Climate” conference: “The AFL-CIO and all the unions in North America are strongly on board the global campaign to reduce carbon emissions and stabilize climate change. Working together with environmental organizations we hope to reverse practices that put our very survival at risk.”

So why have some labor unions thrown their support behind the Energy Citizens Alliance, a nationwide front-group lobbying against climate mitigation legislation and funded by the likes of the Chamber of Commerce and American Petroleum Institute?

According to Energy Citizen’s website, the group’s objective is to force “Congress to reject climate change policies that could raise energy costs and eliminate American jobs.” They opposed the Waxman-Markey climate bill and are now furiously lobbying against the Senate version, claiming it will have “negative effects for families, small businesses, farmers and truckers–but the fact remains that all Americans that drive or fly will feel the impact.”

Besides the Chamber and API, the alliance’s membership includes Laborers’ Local 341, Building and Construction Trades Council of South Central Alaska, and the Pipefitters’ United Association Local 375. The rest of the membership reads like a “who’s who” of the most anti-union and anti-environmental lobbies in the country, including: the National Association of Manufactures, Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, and the American Conservative Union.

Even worse, at least one AFL-CIO state president has become a spokesman for the alliance. At a recent Energy Citizens rally in Alaska, organized to demand that “Senators Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski to reject costly climate change policies”, Vince Beltrami, president of the Alaska AFL-CIO, warned the crowd that one-third of Alaska’s workers owe their jobs to the oil industry, and that climate legislation “will cost jobs in the long term.” Energy Citizens is sponsoring 20 similar rallies around the country to aid efforts to defeat any and all climate legislation. Read the rest of this entry »

[original posted on HuffingtonPost]

Working out on my oyster boat this week, I’ve been slurping my catch and wondering what sort of future lies ahead for those of us who work in industries already being impacted by climate change.

Some like me will be the first to experience the negative effects: I run a small organic oyster farm that faces extinction within the next 40 years because my oysters will not survive rising carbon emissions. Friends of mine are firefighters already facing hotter and more frequent wildfires.

Others work in industries that will gain jobs as a result of efforts to protect the climate: as electrical workers installing solar panels, steelworkers assembling wind turbines and as government workers being redeployed as environmental accountants.

Still others work in industries that will be transformed by climate protection policies, such as coal mining and forestry, who need and want to be part of the green workforce of the future.

As workers we stand on the front lines of the transition to a new green economy. Those of us earning our living in industries impacted by climate change and who believe in the need for both good jobs and sustainable environmental policy, have a stake in the national and global climate change debate and in building a greener, more just economy.

Unlike everyone else, we have both our livelihoods and our planet on the line, giving us a special interest and role in finding real solutions to climate change that also address the economic dimension effectively.

So far, as the politicians fiddle while the world burns, we’ve remained on the sidelines. We have a stake in the outcome of this fight. It’s time to come together and play a role in shaping our future.

Read the rest of this entry »

[by Brecher, Costello and Smith; Reposted by Truthout, CommonDreams, ZNet]

Women sew garments for the needy as part of a stimulus project sponsored by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression.

    We’re all struggling with how to think - and what to do - in the face of the “great recession.” An initial progressive response was to advocate better regulation; then Keynesian economic stimulus; now nationalization; perhaps in the future some kind of socialism.

    One theme that has reverberated through periods of “hard times” in the past is the idea of “production for use.” It has appeared in the form of public works job creation; worker-run enterprises; self-help mutual aid; and efforts to push the envelope on property rights that prevent people from using the resources that are available to meet their needs. Today production for use may find new applications - including working to save the planet from climate destruction.

    What are recessions, depressions and economic “hard times”?

    According to conventional economics, markets guide companies and investors to bring together labor and means of production to produce the goods and services that people need. Notwithstanding numerous “market failures,” something like that happens in capitalist economies during normal times.

    But in times of economic crisis, recession and depression, it doesn’t work like that. Instead, people lose their livelihoods, homes and health care and slash their budgets for food and other necessities - even while workers who want to work are unemployed and underemployed and offices, factories and construction sites lie idle. As a result, people often begin thinking and doing things that they didn’t think and do before.

    Since 1900, the US experienced depressions and recessions in 1903, 1907, 1911, 1914, 1921, the whole decade of the 1930s, 1949, 1954, 1957, 1961, 1970, 1982, 1990, and 2002.

    We don’t know how severe the current “great recession” will be. One thing we know from hard times past, however, is that they are almost always declared over when they have barely begun. Prosperity is always just around the corner. True to form, as early as April, headlines like “Top U.S. officials offered reassurances that the worst of the economic downturn is likely over,” began appearing in media outlets around the country. Maybe so. But what should we do if it is not?

    Production for Use

    A reverberating theme that emerges in hard times is the idea of “production for use,” rather than production only if production is profitable in the market. This requires actions - whether by government or by ordinary community members - that attempt to meet needs directly, rather than through the failing process of production for the market.

    Remarkably, President Obama laid out this precise this idea - rarely heard in public discourse in The United States since the 1930’s - in advocating his economic stimulus legislation.

    His plan, he said, recognizes both the paradox and the promise of this moment - the fact that there are millions of Americans trying to find work, even as, all around the country, there is so much work to be done. That’s why we’ll invest in priorities like energy and education; health care and a new infrastructure that are necessary to keep us strong and competitive in the 21st century.

    Such an approach has a long history.

    In every major U.S. recession since 1808, unemployed people and allies have organized to demanded job creation through public works at local, state national and even international levels. (Franklin Folsom offers a history of these efforts in his book, “Impatient Armies of the Poor.”) And in an earlier post we described how the international labor movement proposed international public works as a way to overcome the mass unemployment of the Great Depression - and to combat the fascist movements it was engendering. This expressed an intuitive - and at times explicit - sense that if there are things that need to be done and people who need work, why shouldn’t those people be put to work doing what needs to be done?

    New Deal public works programs like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) employed millions and substantially reduced unemployment until Roosevelt cut them back in the face of conservative hostility. The WPA was notable for its emphasis on putting people to work doing things that utilize their existing skills. Read the rest of this entry »

[The Nation, May 19, 2009, By Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith. Original posted here.]

As Americans are inundated with revelations about the lies, torture and other crimes that accompanied the US-led war in Iraq, many who resisted continue to be punished for refusing to participate in those crimes. First Lt. Ehren Watada, the first commissioned military officer to refuse deployment to Iraq, won a significant legal victory last week when the US Department of Justice dropped efforts to retry him after a bungled court-martial. But his legal problems continue.

As America struggles with how to hold its homegrown war criminals accountable, those who resisted provide lessons for how to prevent war crimes in the future. Releasing Watada from the Army, and providing amnesty for all those who have been punished for resisting the Iraq War, must be a central part of America’s coming to terms with Bush administration policies. Indeed, their arguments and actions should be studied by every civics class and everyone who aspires to high public office.

Watada’s stand

In 2006, Watada, an infantry officer based at Fort Lewis, Washington, refused to be deployed to Iraq on grounds that the war was illegal and immoral and that to participate in it would make him complicit in war crimes. The Army court-martialed him, but at the last minute Military Judge John Head declared a mistrial. The Army attempted to retry him, but civilian US District Court Judge Benjamin Settle barred the retrial as a violation of the Constitution’s ban on double jeopardy. The Army then appealed the decision, but last week Solicitor General Elena Kagan ordered the appeal withdrawn. Yet the Army is still considering further action against Watada. Now that most Americans, including President Obama, understand the truth of Lt. Watada’s assertion that the Iraq War was based on a lie, it is time to let Ehren Watada go.

Watada’s stand was not the conventional conscientious objection to all wars; it was based on his belief that this particular war was illegal. He maintained that it violated the Constitution and the War Powers Act, which “limits the President in his role as commander in chief from using the armed forces in any way he sees fit.” It was illegal under the UN Charter, the Geneva Convention and the Nuremberg principles, which “all bar wars of aggression.” He claimed the conduct of the occupation violated the Army Field Manual; “The wholesale slaughter and mistreatment of the Iraqi people” is “a contradiction to the Army’s own law of land warfare.”

These are the real issues about the Iraq War that Americans must grapple with in the future.

Military injustice

The Army’s behavior toward Watada has been disgraceful from the start. The entire controversy could have been forestalled if the Army had not refused his initial request to resign. The Army charged Watada not only with “missing movement” but with “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman” for speaking critically of government policy and President George W. Bush in ways that the military’s own courts had repeatedly established to be constitutionally protected. In an effort to intimidate Watada’s supporters, Army prosecutors subpoenaed journalists and organizers of public meetings.

Judge Head conducted the court-martial without regard for basic principles of justice and fairness. He ruled Watada’s motivation irrelevant and prohibited any testimony on whether the orders he was given were, in fact, legal. He declared a mistrial over the objections of the defense; the civilian judge who reviewed the case charged that “the military judge likely abused his discretion” in doing so.

Army prosecutors then initiated a second court-martial of Watada on the same charges, which a civilian judge declared to be a violation of the Constitution’s protection against double jeopardy. The Army then announced that it would appeal the case, but took no action for eighteen months, all the while refusing to allow Watada’s long overdue discharge from the Army.

In late April, Mike Wong and Gerry Condon, Vietnam war resisters and members of Veterans for Peace, learned that the Army had referred the decision regarding its appeal of the federal court’s double jeopardy ruling to the US solicitor general. They initiated an Internet-based “Ad Hoc Campaign to Free Ehren Watada.” Their alert was reposted on over 300 blogs and websites, resulting in hundreds of phone calls, letters and e-mails to the Obama Justice Department officials. Nine days later, the Justice Department withdrew the appeal.

According to Kenneth Kagan, one of Watada’s attorneys (and no relation to Elena Kagan), the Army could have drawn out its appeal until 2010 or 2011. But the new solicitor general sought to take a “leadership position” on the case. “It’s obviously a bold decision to depart from past policies,” he said.

Yet even after the Justice Department ordered the appeal withdrawn, the Army is still maintaining its option to punish Watada on two additional counts of “conduct unbecoming an officer” that were withdrawn during the original court-martial.

Fort Lewis spokesman Joe Piek was quoted in a Honolulu Advertiser report as saying that the leadership at Fort Lewis is considering “a full range of judicial and administrative options that are available, and those range from court-martial on those two remaining specifications, to nonjudicial punishment, to administrative separation from the Army.” Read the rest of this entry »

For those of you blogging for your organization, you’re not alone. Almost as many Americans now make their living as bloggers as there are lawyers; more now make their primary income from blogging than those working as computer programmers or firefighters.

As video quickly becomes a dominant online communications tool, groups have been searching out new ways of driving eyeballs from their videos to off-site donation, petitions and sign-up pages.  This week the folks over at the YouTube Nonprofit Program have introduced a new “call-to-action” tool to allow nonprofits to “create customizable in-video ad overlays for their videos, which will drive traffic to external pages.”

Charity:Water recently gave the new tool a try to commemorate World Water Day. They used “call to action” overlay to encourage YouTube users to donate money to build wells and provide clean, safe drinking water for people in Africa. The response from the YouTube community was pretty outstanding, raising over $10,000 in one day from the video.

It’s pretty simple to use. To add an overlay, go to YouTube’s “edit video” function and fill out the “call to action” section on the right-hand side. Then click “Save” and the overlay should appear on your video. The downside is that to use the tool, groups need to join YouTube’s Nonprofit Program,

Here’s Charity:Water’s video with the donation overlay:

(by Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello and Brendan Smith; original available here)

The G-20 summit convening in London on April 2 is preparing to create a quarter trillion dollars of brand new stimulus money to help poor countries battle the global recession.

World leaders plan to use a little-known form of global currency to pay the freight, a currency known technically as “Special Drawing Rights” (SDRs) but often referred to as “paper gold.” It’s a currency that can be issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and The Telegraph has reported that the U.S. government is keen on the idea.

Senior figures in the U.S. Treasury have been encouraging the Fund to issue hundreds of billions of dollars worth [of SDRs] to prevent the recession from turning into a global depression.

If leaders at the G-20 summit can create “paper gold” to jump-start the global economy, they can also turn it in a green direction to jump-start protection of the global climate.

They should put much of paper gold stimulus under discussion into an international fund, to help developing countries pay for climate protection. Such an action would remove the greatest stumbling block in the way of international climate action – the lack of financing to pay for energy conservation, technology transfer, adaptation, forest conservation, clean energy, and research and development. It would allow negotiators to arrive in Copenhagen for climate talks at the end of the year with the finances in place to negotiate and sign a global deal. Read the rest of this entry »

In the early 1930s, as global unemployment tripled in two years and the world plunged into the Great Depression, the world’s labor movements developed a program for fighting the global crisis through international public works.  It’s a little-known historical might-have-been that could have helped halt the Great Depression, the rise of Adolph Hitler, and the Second World War.  And, as the efforts of world leaders to address today’s “Great Recession” threaten to break down in nationalist rivalry and petty political bickering, it bears lessons - and perhaps an alternative vision - for today.

Workers and organized labor have historically advocated government public works as a solution to unemployment.  Not only would they provide jobs and income for those directly employed, but they would raise overall purchasing power, thereby creating demand for the products of other workers and creating a virtuous circle of economic growth.  In the context of swelling unemployment in the early Depression, discussion of national public works programs developed in many countries.

The proposal for international public works originated with General German Trade Union Alliance (ADGB), which included most of Germany’s trade unions and represented the great majority of its workers.  The plan won the support first of the German union alliance, then of unions around the world, and finally of the League of Nations’ International Labor Organization.

The plan was worked out by the head of the Alliance’s statistical department, W.S. Woytinsky.  Woytinsky was a Russian émigré who had been president of the St. Petersburg Council of the Unemployed during the 1905 revolution and had organized mass action to force the city to provide public works employment.  Observing Germany’s combination of spiraling deflation and spiraling unemployment in the early 1930s, he came up with the idea of using credit expansion to finance massive public works.

Taking a cue from recent League of Nations policy proposals, Woytinsky proposed an international agreement that would allow the lowering the gold reserve requirements for national currencies.  That would let central banks create new money that could finance international public works and thereby create the purchasing power needed to reflate the economy.

In a June, 1931, article, Woytinsky proposed an “Action Program for Reviving the Economy.”  It called for the labor movement to “assume the role of conveyor of the idea of an activist world economic policy.”  It was up to the labor movement to “force the state and all public institutions to implement measures to revive the economy.”

Labor’s policy “must be a global economic policy.  All nations are suffering because the world economy is sick, and therefore they must all concentrate their forces upon joint action to overcome the worldwide crisis.”  The international agreement would provide an alternative to the rise of economic nationalism, supporting “tariff reductions and European economic unification” as well as “internationalization of wage policy and social policy.”  The program would also support workers’ fight for higher wages, shorter hours, social rights, and regulation of business. Read the rest of this entry »

Economic nationalism is back and that is not a good sign for working people. “Buy American” or “Buy French” or “Buy [add your country here]” campaigns are often presented as a way to protect workers and undo the damage done to workers by 30 years of corporate-dominated globalization.”  But such efforts are out of touch with today’s realities; they can backfire on the workers they claim to support and could even push the global economy deeper into the abyss.  Workers desperately need an alternative to the economic practices, frequently but misleadingly referred to as “free trade,” that let corporations promote a worldwide “race to the bottom.”  But economic nationalism provides only the illusion of such an alternative.

In the US, economic nationalism has recently emerged around the “Buy American” provision requiring that U.S.-made products, in particular steel, be used in projects funded by the recent $790 billion stimulus bill.  One of the most vocal corporate supporters of the legislation has been Dan DiMicco, CEO of Nukor, the largest steel producer in the US. He recently told CBS’s 60 Minutes that the goal of the stimulus package “is to stop the bleeding of jobs and to create jobs here in American, not overseas, not in China, not in Europe.”

Some Americans who have seen DiMicco’s TV interviews may feel reassured that an American businessman is finally willing to act in the interest of American, rather than moving American jobs abroad. What DiMicco forgot to mention is that Nukor has also been partnering with Chinese steel maker Shougang Corporation to build a new steel plant in Australia.

Corporate led globalization has produced a global economy in which goods, services, and capital are like a global ball of yarn which has become so tangled that it can only be untangled with great care. US corporations produce or buy goods in China employing Chinese workers; Chinese money finances the US debt keeping the US economy afloat; complex manufactured goods produced almost anywhere in the world are assembled from parts produced in the global supply chain; and we all now know how toxic financial instruments assembled from loans made to poor and working class Americans spread from the US to infect economies everywhere. If we start untangling the global ball of yarn without considering the consequences for people throughout the world we will accelerate and deepen the crises we find out selves in.

This is not an argument for perpetuating the kind of globalization that just means the right of corporations to roam the world doing anything they want without restraint by democratic governments and institutions.  That kind of globalization, fortunately, is currently collapsing. But it needs to be replaced, not by an economic war of all against all, but by democratic decision making that is as decentralized as it can be while still being effective.

The task for the world’s labor movements, global justice activists, progressive political forces, and NGO’s is to demand that a new order be based on mutual consultation and mutual gain and not on beggar-thy-neighbor policies. That means “re-localizing” a great deal of the global economy, but in ways that benefit, rather than harm, the interests and living standards of ordinary people and helps restore a more sustainable environment.

In this post we open a thread on ways to avoid both destructive economic nationalism and failed corporate globalization.  We start with a little known history — the reactionary history of Buy America campaigns in the US, which are driven by the same impulses that pushed for Buy American provisions in the stimulus package.  This history, as revealed Dana Frank’s book Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Beacon Press, 1999), teaches us that steel magnate Dan DiMicco represents a great American tradition: the very business leaders who have demanded that American workers Buy American have often secretly sought foreign assets and played workers around the world off against each other in a never ending race to the bottom.

The Boston Tea Party
Buy American campaigns are as American as the Boston Tea Party. On the night of December 16, 1773, between fifty and a hundred colonists, with faces blackened, climbed onboard three ships moored in Boston harbor to dump 90,000 pounds of tea into the ocean. The nation’s first Buy American protest was attended by an audience of 2,000 or 3,000, watching silently from the harbor docks. Read the rest of this entry »

n 2008, Tunisian human rights activists discovered that their campaign videos were being blocked on Youtube and other video sharing sites by the Ben Ali regime. So they switched tactics and came up with an innovative new way to “map” government abuse.

They used an emerging technique called “Geo-bombing” that allows users to “geotag” video inside of GoogleEarth and Google Maps. Basically all you do is enter the location you want your video to appear on GoogleEarth (this is the “geotag”) as you are uploading your video on Youtube and then check the Youtube toggle button on Google Earth (here’s an easy two-step guide with pictures courtesy of Global Voices Online).

According to Global Voices, the Tunisian activists from the collective blog Nawaat.org (The Core) used this technique to link tens of video testimonies of Tunisian political prisoners and human rights defenders to the Tunisian presidential palace’s location on Google Earth. So now as users (the media use Google Earth all the time) fly over the Tunisian presidential palace on Google Earth they see it covered with the very same videos about civil liberty violations that were blocked on Youtube. The Presidential palace is now “mapped” as a human rights abuser with first hand video testimony for world to see. See the screen shot below.

Tunisia’s far away from our local communities in places like Detroit or Birmingham, but we might imagine “mapping” our local communities with these new tools. We might imagine geotagging videos of grassroots activists telling their stories of struggle over the offices of corporate wrongdoers, slumlords, banks, politicians, etc. I Love Mountains, a campaign by REVERB hub Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and Appalachian Voices have already done a version of this around mountaintop removal.

Here’s the virtual Sit-in at Tunisian Presidential Palace

Deanna Zandt , a media technologist and consultant, has put together a simple and useful “Non-fanatical beginner’s guide to Twitter” for people who want to experiment a little, quickly learn the lingo and figure out how they might integrate Twitter into their work or personal lives. According to Deanna, “It takes a while to get the feel of Twitter. Commit, if you can, to trying it a couple times a day for two weeks or so. At the end of your little trial period, assess how you feel and how you think you’ll use it.”

Here are a few of her tips on what to “tweet” about on Twitter:

What do I say? Well, just about anything, really. Okay, we’re probably not going to be interested in your belly button lint… but here are some methodologies you can try out:

• Pure professional. You’re an expert in your field and you want to share this with the world. Pick a couple of “beats” and focus your twittering on those beats. Find other folks tweeting about these topics and have conversations with them.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Tim Costello & Brendan Smith

[original available here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090302/costello_smith]

The recently concluded World Social Forum is a good gauge for assessing the state of the world’s alternative social, economic and political movements. Organized in 2001 as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum, the annual meeting of global and corporate elites held in Davos, Switzerland, the WSF brings social movement organizations and activists from around the world together around the idea that “another world is possible.” If Davos represents a failed globalization from above, the WSF represents an emerging globalization from below. It’s a massive affair–this year more than 100,000 people gathered here for the five-day event. Part political convention, part carnival, part countercultural happening, the WSF serves as the center of gravity for the global justice movement that emerged in the late 1990s to contest corporate globalization.

The question on the minds of many was how to respond to what some call the “crisis of crises”–the economic, climate, political and cultural catastrophes that have engulfed the planet–and whether social movements can provide a unifying alternative vision for a better world. Economist Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South summed it up: “There is a sense of urgency and seriousness combining both pragmatism and principle. There is much less rhetoric. Things are taking place very fast outstripping what many predicted. There is a clear collapse of neo-liberalism. We have been triumphant over Davos…. Now we need alternatives and must get down to the hard work of creating them.”

Why Belém?

Even before the economic crisis broke, Belém was chosen as this year’s site to highlight environmental threats. Located sixty miles from the Atlantic on Guajara Bay in the Amazon estuary, Belém is no stranger to environmental conflicts or to impact of globalization. Originally built as an outpost of the Portuguese empire, it served for centuries as a gateway to Amazonia and shipping point for the region’s natural resources. Today it is a port of call for container ships picking up aluminum, iron ore, lumber and other riches of the rainforest.

According to climate change activist Oscar Reyes of Carbon Watch, the selection Belém was appropriate: “The deforestation issue is connected into the global negotiations and essential to dealing with climate change. The threat to the Amazon–an area that contains half the remaining rainforest in the world–is not primarily from small-scale deforestation, it’s pulp mills, mining, cattle, soy, and agrifuels. You can make sense of that in Belém where these are real and live issues.”

Hard economic times and the remoteness of the location skewed the turnout this year–the vast majority of the participants were from Brazil and Latin America–but there were still healthy contingents from every continent. While most of the 5,808 participating organizations were from Latin America, about 1,600 were drawn from the rest of the world, including 491 from Europe, 489 from Africa, 334 from Asia and 155 from North America. In addition to the rank-and-file participants, the presidents of Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay also made appearances.

The WSF also chose to highlight the Amazon’s indigenous people. Their attendance was not a folkloric touch: in marches and other events, indigenous participants demanded that their concerns be addressed and that their struggle for cultural survival be part of the global justice movement. From their perspective, the “other world” the WSF envisions must include space for those who have made a different pact with modernity.

This forum carried on its tradition of logistical chaos. The 2,310 “self-organized seminars” and other events were spread out over two university campuses along the banks of the river about a mile and a half apart and a few miles from the center of the city. Some participants complained of spending more time ferrying back and forth between campuses in taxis, buses and on a flotilla of old riverboats than they did in meetings.

The global economic meltdown made the Belém forum different from previous ones. The WSF and the global justice movement were formed in the expansive phase of globalization; now they must adapt to global economic contraction and impending environmental disaster. This year’s participants know that they were right about the failure of corporate-led globalization, but they also know that just saying no is no longer adequate. The prospects of a global wave of beggar-thy-neighbor currency devaluations and destructive trade policies in response to the crisis and the revival of virulent nationalism loomed over the discussions. Many wondered if what was once dubbed the “anti-globalization movement” could produce a global response based on global solidarity. Read the rest of this entry »